If you thought all there was to Twitter was going online every now and again and just putting in the hours every day towards following, replying, messaging, re-tweeting, and favoriting, boy you were where I was when I started out. The truth is,

I stayed that way for a long time, until running into tools that happened to make managing a Twitter account a strategic play. Twitter is a very important social platform for individuals to build their personal brand, but more so for small & medium businesses.

We recently did a blog about how SMBs should use social media to promote their brand, read it here.

And while these might seem basic to some, it still goes unnoticed to a large chunk of users, who, despite all the effort they put in, just can’t seem to catch a break. By sticking to these hacks, not only will you be able to produce relevant content, but you’ll also be able to measure the impact of such content!

Any sane person knows that in the modern day, it’s not enough to produce content, it’s essential to produce relevant content. But how do you know what’s going to gel well and what won’t? Usually, this takes time to observe and make changes, but who’s got the time these days?

A lot of third party services are present to measure analytics and range from free, to cheap, to expensive. But did you know, Twitter provides analytics from within its platform?

These analytics provide coverage of every tweet individually, and over a custom time period that you can set. It measures:

Impressions: Number of times users saw the tweet on Twitter.

Engagements: Number of times a user has interacted with a tweet, including all clicks anywhere on the tweet, retweets, favorites, replies, follows.

Engagement Rate: A measure of how effective a tweet was; the number of engagements divided by the number of impressions.

Although this is not activated by default, a simple login will set you for life. However, it only starts collecting data from the time that you have activated it. So, you might miss out on historic data if analytics is not activated.

All this is done for every tweet. And what’s even better? You can export all the data for the custom time period you set, onto a spreadsheet format that you can download. What’s even better is that this is free, and not from a third party!

Have you ever wondered why some of your tweets aren’t getting seen, or don’t get traction at all in some cases? When you’ve spent countless minutes coming up with that witty comment? Now, there are ways to explain this from a technical standpoint, not regarding the actual quality of contribution of your tweet. Let’s look at the differences:(1) REPLY– Tweet starts with a username (@TwitterHandle). – Seen by the user who you are sending the tweet to, and– Seen only by people following both you and the user you are replying to.

These tweets are indeed still visible on your profile, and any Twitter search results.

(2) MENTION– Tweet contains the username (@TwitterHandle), but not in the very beginning. – Seen by everyone who follows you

As you might be able to tell, a reply garners much less viewership, if at all any. All those years of clever comments probably didn’t make frontline status because you replied instead of mentioning!

3. Keyboard shortcuts!

Although most of you might be browsing on your phone, or may be comfortably scrolling with a mouse, there are moments when we all prefer the comfort of sticking to our computer keyboards.

But where did I unearth thee commands from? Was it an extension I installed? Do I need to use a third party client to increase my Twitter browsing pace? Nope, nope, and nope. All these commands are accessible at ANY time by simply clicking on your profile at the top right on Twitter, and then selecting the option ‘Keyboard Shortcuts’.

Although probably not something that would be as game changing as them other ‘hacks’, these do go a long way in breaking into our comfort zone. I’ve used the shortcuts to go through my feeds in a more meaningful manner than by scrolling, and then switching to keyboard, then switching to scrolling again.

4. Timing your Tweets!

Just like with checking out analytics, there are tons of pretty cool services that help you optimize the timing of your tweet and offer a lot of elements that might justify having to sign up for yet another website. But you don’t have to, because Twitter has its own tools for this, again just like with analytics!

Although, the other hacks have covered tools to help when you’re on a computer and are putting in the hours to put yourself or your business in the spotlight, most of us like to keep track and contribute through our personal assistant smartphones. There are a multitude of applications available across different ecosystems, however I’ve personally found TweetCaster the most functional.

But it’s got to be said, the official Twitter application is bare-bones and probably the worst one if you actually want to get yourself across on Twitter.

Tweetcaster is available on the App Store as well as the Play Store, and offers an incredible plethora of features that make it more than sufficient when it’s time to get away from the desk:

Search what’s trending in any region across the world.

Schedule your tweets so that you can have it post at a later time. Schedule individual tweets to be deployed at a custom time.

Adjust the appearance of the layout including whether to show media, and background themes.

Set to notify you of every tweet as it happens live, and customize this so that it only happens when you’re connected to a WiFi, in case you’re on a limited data plan on mobile.

Add your Facebook Account, and have every tweet also be posted to Facebook.

Add multiple Twitter accounts!

Save your marriage

Okay, that last part’s not true, just checking to see if you’re still with us! The awesome part is that the app is free, but also offers a paid model which removes all advertisements.

In case you’re a more adventurous kind and like to try out all the other options, some of the other popular applications for Android include:

And that’s all folks! If you were using these simple hacks, you might be a pro already! However, if Twitter remains a mystery for you and your business presence, which you can’t seem to get your head around, try Solomofy. We’re always there.

It is my sincerest hope that there was at least something in here that would make it worth the read. If you use any other hack that makes Twitter infinitely interesting for you, please share in the comments below.